1. Overview

This project is about helping the SIP providers in their effort of deploying SIP Presence - about overcoming the interoperability problems between the server and client SIP entities, about giving access to SIP presence for the masses.

Right now, the SIP world is segmented into Platform Vendors (companies/projects building SIP servers), into UAC Vendors (companies/projects building SIP user-agents) and providers (companies offering SIP based services to the end users).When come to interoperability issues (which in SIP do have some weight), the vendors are the one who take the hit - they need to put together SIP platform with SIP UACs and over a consistent service to the users.

In a joined effort, Nokia and OpenSIPS Solutions teams worked out the difficulties and produced comprehensive documentation the providers looking forward to implement and deploy full SIP presence services :

getting Nokia S60 presence clients to work well with OpenSIPS/OpenXCAP

how to make everything interoperable in general (with other clients/UAs as well)

how to make it easy for the service providers to take it into use

how to make it easy for the end-users to get their devices correctly configured,

Since the number of people using the VoIP client on their phone is growing (as SIP mobility), NOKIA focused more on a valuable extra feature in S60 SIP client - the presence support, so that users can set availability status messages and see the status of their contacts. More than that, since privacy is very important and users are accustomed to control the access of others to their information, NOKIA put in their client XCAP privacy rules support.

To ensure that this new features will get traction from both SIP users and providers, the project deliverables were focused around building a prove-of-concept platform and writing a manual on how such a platform can be built.The platform is for testing and evaluating on how the presence/xcap features work ; the manual is meant to help the SIP Internet telephony providers implement their own platform that will work with NOKIA S60 SIP client.

2. Platform Installation Tutorial

The platform consists of two components - an OpenSIPS server configured as a presence server and an OpenXCAP server.

You can find here step by step tutorial on how to set these up. The tutorial is written so that with minimal knowledge you can successfully set up an advanced SIP presence server with XCAP permission rules. The sample configuration files can be downloaded from this link.

3. Proof-of-concept platform

The experiment the Presence feeling, you can use the VoIP service offered on the OpenSIPS project.

First you must create an account via the registration page. Then you must login and configure your account to use XCAP for privacy rules. For this you must tick the Enable XCAP check box under the tab my presence.

If you're done setting up the account, you should get a client that has presence with XCAP privacy rules support. A soft client is probably more accessible (ex: eyebeam and bria, sipclient). You must configure the client to register with the account name that you've chosen and use XCAP storage for presence privacy. The XCAP URL is http://opensips.org:443/xcap-root.

For testing you should try to block and unblock contacts from the address book and check if they can see your presence status or not.